An Evening of French Baroque Opera

Join us for a night of French Baroque Opera with Haymarket Opera Company, featuring performers, designers, and conductors. You'll get a behind-the-scenes look at and hear musical excerpts from Haymarket Opera Company's upcoming premiere of Marais' 1696 opera Ariane et Bachus. The evening will include a panel discussion of French Baroque Opera moderated by Haymarket Artistic Director Craig Trompeter. Panelists will include internationally renowned Baroque opera specialist and conductor Harry Bicket and several members of the Haymarket Opera production team: Director and Choreographer Sarah Edgar, Marais specialist Silvana Scarinci, costume designer Meriem Bahri, and 17th-century French theater expert Professor Sylvie Romanowski.

Harry Bicket, opera and concert conductor, is especially noted for his interpretation of baroque and classical repertoire. The Artistic Director of the English Concert and the Chief Conductor of the Sante Fe Opera, Bicket has led the Oslo Philharmonic, Royal Northern Sinfonia, and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France. His opera work includes Le Nozze di Figaro and Rusalka at the Houston Grand Opera along with Maometto at the Canadian Opera Company. Bicket has toured both Europe and America and appeared at Wigmore Hall featuring Iestyn Davies and Andreas Scholl.

Craig Trompeter has been a musical presence in Chicago for more than twenty years. As an acclaimed cellist and violist da gamba he has performed in concert, to name a few, with the Chicago Symphony, Lyric Opera of Chicago, Chicago Opera Theater, and Great Lakes Baroque as well as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Glimmerglass Festival, and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. A soloist at the Ravinia Festival, Craig was a founding member of the Fry Street String Quartet and founded the Feldenkrais® Center of Chicago in 2003, where he teaches Awareness Through Movement® and Functional Integration®.

"Chicago's Haymarket Opera Company has staked out an enviable corner of the period-performance turf." - John von Rhein, Chicago Tribune